Passchendaele

by Paul Ham

  Haig, too, a man of keen religious faith, fell under the siren-like allure of the little cross on the hill. Capturing Passchendaele became something of an obsession for the field marshal who, on several occasions in his life, imagined himself a tool of the Almighty. At the end of 1914, he started to experience a ‘Higher Power’ commanding his destiny.39 We have already seen him on the eve of the Somme, confiding in his wife that he felt a higher power working through him. On the eve of the battles of Passchendaele, Haig felt similarly guided: he prayed and frequently visited his favourite chaplain, and his faith acquired a deeply personal dimension, as Charteris observed:

  He came to regard himself with almost Calvinistic faith as the predestined instrument of Providence for the achievement of victory for the British armies. His abundant self-reliance was reinforced by this conception of himself as the child of destiny.40

  With this spiritual armour, Haig went in person to implore the Canadians to finish the job that the British and Anzacs had started.

  In this light, is it fanciful to suggest that Passchendaele had acquired in Haig’s mind the aura of the last station on a terrible and unremitting Via Dolorosa, along whose bloody path his armies had staggered Christ-like, past the ‘stations’ of Pilckem, Gheluvelt, Broodseinde and Gravenstafel, before their final sacrifice on Passchendaele Ridge?

  Lloyd George presents the other face of this Janus-like duo. The prime minister had approved the Flanders Offensive in the last week of June 1917 on the understanding that he would end it should it fail to progress. It failed and he didn’t – contrary to his later claim that he had done his best to terminate the battle:

  I resisted to the very last the whole project before it was ever commenced, and confidently predicted its failure, giving reasons for my prediction. After its failure was beyond reasonable doubt, I did my best to persuade the Generals to break it off.41

  True, Lloyd George opposed the offensive before it began; but there is no record of him telling Haig to end it after it began. Nor did the prime minister have much to say about the progress of the battle; the subject surfaced fleetingly in Cabinet, as we’ve seen. Had the prime minister more important things on his mind than one of the bloodiest military encounters in British history? Or did he withhold his disgust behind the steeliest exertions of self-restraint? The answer to both questions is no: Lloyd George lived and breathed the war effort; he was a stranger to self-restraint.

  He had his own reasons for deciding not to call off the offensive. Those reasons were not the ones he later gave, such as ignorance: ‘I was a layman and in matters of military strategy I did not possess the knowledge and training that would justify me in overriding soldiers of such standing and experience. Accordingly, the soldiers had their way.’42 That rings hollow in light of his brash intervention to put Haig under French command, and his solo crusade for the Italian campaign.

  A less risible case for Lloyd George’s decision not to intervene was that he bowed to conservative pressure. ‘Passchendaele could not have been stopped without dismissing Sir Douglas Haig,’ he later wrote. ‘But I could not have done it without the assent of the Cabinet. I sounded the Members of the Cabinet individually on the subject and I also spoke to some of the Dominion representatives. They – or most of them – were under the spell of the synthetic victories distilled at G.H.Q.’43 Again, this fails to convince. Are we led to believe that this rowdiest of political animals, leader of a nation at war, yielded to a few colonials and conservative politicians, who were in no position to replace him?

  There is a Machiavellian explanation for Lloyd George’s inertia: he was giving Haig enough rope to hang himself. This scenario courts power politics at its most brutal, but it has substance in the context of their bitter personal struggle and eye on their place in history. The prime minister certainly recognised the cost to Haig personally of failing to take Passchendaele, as we’ve seen. In which case, if Lloyd George overruled his commander, and called off the offensive on 9 October, he would have rescued Haig from any responsibility for its failure. The press would have leaped to defend their favourite commander against a meddling politician. And Haig would have been able to blame Lloyd George for preventing his men from capturing Passchendaele and perhaps breaking through. Lloyd George might even have gone down as the prime minister who lost the war.

  Lloyd George later conceded as much. Had he tried to stop Passchendaele, he remarked, ‘they would have said I had spoilt the chance of a decisive success, and of saving us from the danger of submarines’.44 At the time to which he refers, he knew Britain had won the U-boat war. In other words, here speaks the consummate politician, pursuing his personal legacy ahead of thousands of lives. And so, throughout October, the prime minister stood quietly watching, letting Haig pursue an offensive that Lloyd George already thought a spectacular, bloody failure – but one that must be seen to be Haig’s failure.

  Lloyd George would not reveal the true state of his mind for decades. When it showed itself, with the publication of his memoirs in the 1930s, his wrath was terrible to behold. Guilt tormented him: he had long brooded on the tragedy of Flanders, and by molten increments the demon of conscience had worn him down. In the post-war years, in a terrific outpouring of rage, blame, grief and regret, he sat down to write his memoir. With his hair hanging long and white, and his mind as agile as ever, the retired politician then in his late 60s took up his pen and with every weapon in his formidable intellectual armoury sallied forth to clear his name and excoriate the man he held solely responsible for ‘the most gigantic, tenacious, grim, futile and bloody fight ever waged in the history of war’.45

  First published in 1933, the memoir devoted an entire chapter to Passchendaele, under the title ‘The Campaign of the Mud’. A few extracts convey Lloyd George’s mood and intent. Passchendaele was a ‘ghastly fiasco’46, fought according to the ‘unimaginative’ and ‘commonplace’ strategy of attrition, ‘an afterthought of beaten Generals to explain away their defeat …’47

  It got worse: ‘But as soon as the troops went over the top, they found that they had to pass through exactly the same experiences as those to which they had been subjected in the discredited offensives of the past few years – machine guns playing upon their crumbling ranks from positions which had not been touched by their artillery … the enemy still entrenched behind a line of impregnable earthworks.’48

  ‘The troops felt that they had been fooled and sold and their comrades butchered.’49

  ‘When it was finally concluded, the attack had completely failed in all the purposes for which it was originally designed …’50

  ‘Whilst hundreds of thousands were being destroyed in the insane egotism of Passchendaele, every message or memorandum from Haig was full of these insistences on the importance of sending him more men to replace those he had sent to die in the mud. If Britain said, “Where are my lost legions?” then anyone who asked such a question on her behalf was betraying the Army and attacking our soldiers.’51

  The question of ‘blame’ is always fraught. On the one hand, there are many who follow Lloyd George’s lead and hold Haig chiefly responsible. Among them are millions of tender souls who defend the war but condemn the way it was fought, as if humane methods were at the commanders’ disposal. Theirs is a decent hypocrisy. Yet to criticise Haig or Ludendorff for not fighting a ‘nicer’ or more restrained war is akin to criticising a lion for not showing mercy to a zebra; or decrying the lack of morals in a virus. That is not to suggest the commanders were ‘willing executioners’ – most were deeply affected by their soldiers’ sacrifice. It is simply to state the unpalatable fact that the commanders on the Western Front had little choice other than to fight the war as they did; the casualties were not only planned for, they were inevitable, in the absence of the political will to stop the carnage.

  In this sense, Haig’s or Ludendorff’s characters were irrelevant, because force of will ultimately had little bearing on the kind of war being fought in France and Belgium.
Every commander – to the dismayed incomprehension of their civilian leaders – was condemned to fight or defend within the straitjacket of attrition. Over and again, the British, French, Dominion and German armies explored ways to end the struggle of the trenches, to return to open, mobile battle: Nivelle’s ‘two-day miracle’, Gough’s ‘breakthrough’, Plumer’s ‘bite and hold’, clouds of gas, huge mines, the creeping barrage, shock troops, lightning counter-attacks, massed tanks … None changed the fundamental conditions of the bashing war of the trenches. No army or weapons system was able to break the deadlock until the last do-or-die onslaughts of 1918, when the Allies’ numeric supremacy and the Germans’ exhaustion determined the outcome. In sum, if the Great War was not inevitable – there ‘are always choices’, as the historian (and Lloyd George’s great-granddaughter) Margaret MacMillan reminds us52 – the methods of fighting it were.

  This powerlessness manifested itself at government level, too. Having declared war, the European powers had little control over the monster they had unleashed, or how it should be fought. Once they had said ‘yes’ to war, they had said ‘yes’ to the creeping barrage, frontal assaults and enormous casualties – an equation the civilian rulers misunderstood or refused to accept. It meant unleashing every available weapon on the enemy’s lines, no matter how horrible or ‘illegal’. International law had banned but failed to prevent the use of mustard gas, of course (just as it would fail to prevent firebombs in the Second World War and napalm in Vietnam).53

  On the other hand, to exonerate the commanders and politicians as helpless pawns who were ‘unable to impose their will on events’ is to remove the human agency from the machinery of war.54 What men had begun, they were able to end, had there been the political and moral will to do so. Yet nobody took responsibility. The politicians stood aside. As with the Vietnam and Iraq wars, those in charge escaped any punitive action for their colossal misjudgements. A soldier who lost control of himself and deserted faced severe punishment, possibly execution. A commander or politician who lost control of the war, or whose errors caused thousands of needless casualties, could expect to be forgiven, lauded and ennobled.

  Though he was later rewarded with an earldom, greatness would always be denied Field Marshal Haig. ‘Why has not Haig been recognised as one of England’s greatest generals?’ asked a newspaper eighteen years after the armistice. ‘The answer may be given in one word – “Passchendaele”.’55

  Humanely, then, we are driven to conclude with a question. A war armed with the technology to kill a generation of men, doomed to use it because the generals could find no other way: did this not place an unprecedented responsibility on the political leaders to intervene and agree a compromise peace? That is the question Passchendaele forces upon us. Haig himself believed a negotiated truce the only option, when his spirits were lowest, in early 1918. Knowing, by 1917, that the trenches were unbreakable without appalling losses, the governments of Europe had a historic duty to find a way to end it, to save the flower of European youth. They chose not to, and utterly failed the societies they ruled or represented.

  The people were ignorant of these issues, of course, so it is no good defending the continuation of the war on the grounds that ‘the people’ wanted it (as some historians have suggested). Few knew what had actually happened in Flanders until well after the war. Lloyd George knew, and this is how he carried the burden of truth:

  If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow, but of course they don’t – and can’t know. The correspondents don’t write and the censorship won’t pass the truth … The thing is horrible and beyond human nature to bear and I feel I can’t go on with this bloody business … 56

  EPILOGUE

  REQUIEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH

  What would our fathers do if one day we rose up and confronted them, and called them to account? … Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterward? And what can possibly become of us?

  Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front

  [I felt] the heart-breaking realisation that I’ll never get the warm, friendly grip of welcome from my own proud father. The dear father, whom I loved as few men ever loved a father … May God rest his dear soul …

  Private Edward Lynch, author of Somme Mud, on his return to Australia

  On the 100th anniversary of Passchendaele, poppies and medals will be worn, wreathes laid, tears shed. Armchair generals, academics and journalists will mourn the ‘catastrophe’: ‘Ah, yes, Passchendaele, appalling business. Shocking.’ Then comes the ‘but’: ‘But it had to be done. All part of a just war, you know. Absolutely necessary. Saved the world from tyranny.’

  And so the true meaning – the warning – of the sacrifice slides away from our understanding, and this avoidable slaughter is cast as another battle in a ‘necessary’ war in which millions had to die, over whose bodies millions mourn and learn nothing.

  No doubt, many soldiers and civilians were sad to see it all end. On Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, Colonel Wilkinson was standing by his old friend, Sergeant Oscar Warner, watching the fireworks. After a while, Wilkinson said to Warner, ‘Well, what do you think of all this?’ Warner ‘looked at me for a moment and then he said, “I’m sorry it’s all over, Sir, we’ll never have times like this again!”’ He repeated those words to troops in training for many years after the war.1

  Many more would never forget the horror, their post-war trauma brutally articulated in Richard Aldington’s autobiographical novel, Death of a Hero. Aldington came home nursing ‘a vendetta of the dead against the living’, born of survivor’s guilt. ‘What right have I to live?’ he asks. No answer came, and he felt ‘icily alone’.2

  Implicit in his fury at being alive in a world he despised was a longing for a ‘hero’s death’, like the one he awards his main character, Winterbourne. On hearing a badly wounded runner cry out, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, kill me, kill me’, Winterbourne bursts over the top into a hail of fire. ‘Something seemed to break in Winterbourne’s head,’ Aldington writes. ‘He felt he was going mad, and sprang to his feet. The line of bullets smashed across his chest like a savage steel whip. The universe exploded darkly into oblivion.’3

  How can the living atone, Aldington wondered:

  for the lost millions and millions of years of life, how atone for those lakes and seas of blood? … Somehow or other we have to make those dead acceptable, we have to atone for them, we have to appease them. How, I don’t quite know. I know there’s the Two Minutes’ Silence. But after all, a Two Minutes’ Silence once a year isn’t doing much … What can we do? Headstones and wreaths and memorials and speeches and the Cenotaph – no, no; it has got to be something in us. Somehow we must atone to the dead …

  It is poisoning us, this inability to atone, he writes: ‘It is the poison that makes us heartless and hopeless and lifeless – us, the War Generation, and the new generation too. The whole world is blood-guilty …”4

  Old men tend to write the history of war. Old men often forget they’re writing about very young men. They unwittingly project their cynicism and experience onto lads just out of school, idealistic young men with little knowledge of life, love or loss, and whose adult lives were just beginning.

  In a similar misperception, the young tend to think of ‘war veterans’ as old men. They forget that the defining moments of a veteran’s life, relived for many years later, draw on the most extreme experiences of his youth.

  And in his idealism, the young soldier believed in and cherished those qualities of friendship, loyalty and self-sacrifice. He cheerfully offered up his body to the grizzled politicians and hoary generals, who hungrily dispatched it to the front, with the proud complicity of his girlfriend, parents and society.

  Once he started fighting, the British, Dominion and German soldier did not stop – until he was killed, wounded or ordered. And it is often asked why, after so much bloodshed, knowing what he risked, did he persist? The soldier’s answer is alwa
ys the same: he kept fighting for the sake of his friends … in the name of the dead buried beneath him and the esteem of the living marching beside him.5

  If we are to understand what went through their minds, and grasp a deeper truth about war, we need to listen to them: to Neville Hind’s frustration, Ronald Skirth’s defiance, Richard Aldington’s bitterness, Patrick Campbell’s fear, the Seabrook brothers’ innocence … and the courage in them all, in Allfree, Allhusen, Lynch, Birnie, Wilkinson, Yoxall, the War Poets, Remarque, Jünger and hundreds of thousands of other voices – British, Anzac, Canadian, German, French – whose feelings imbue these pages. For theirs are the true voices of the history of war. But who is listening to them anymore?

  The Tommies returned to a mean-spirited and ungrateful nation, a far cry from the ‘land fit for heroes’ the British Government had promised them. In fairness, the British people could be forgiven for wanting to forget the war. But the soldier could not. So traumatic was the memory of Passchendaele that, 27 years later, in his third attempt to take the Italian town of Cassino during the Second World War, the New Zealand lieutenant general Sir Bernard Freyberg VC, GCMG, KCB, KBE, DSO (with three bars) merely had to utter the word ‘Passchendaele’ to bring the entire operation to a halt.6